Online Marketing Inside Out

Marketing your websites from SEO to social networks.

By: Staff

AdSense

The book explains that successful marketing involves steps summed up as: attract, engage and transact. However, equally important to executing a successful campaign is understanding the medium, whether it's email or FaceBook or a setting-up an affiliate program. A successful campaign will use that that knowledge and measure the results.

The book is broken into nine chapters that starts with an introduction to marketing and then follows with two chapters on marketing in general, "21st Century Public Relations" and "The Changing Face of Marketing." These two are followed by "Turn Page Views into Profits" is on the importance of measuring results. At the end of these three chapters readers will have learned a bit about marketing in general, writing press releases and doing A/B testing of websites.

These chapters are followed by ones on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media marketing, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, and finally, on-line advertising, before a closing chapter about how a campaign will pull the lessons of all the previous chapters together. Most readers will find at least some of the material familiar. I found I was familiar with most of the SEO material given - and I found that reassuring; if they got the details right about SEO, then the rest of the material is probably equally reliable.

The social networking chapter was quite interesting in that it not only covered the major do's and don'ts of putting your brand on the web, but there's examples of how SitePoint has used social networking websites successfully. A lot of the guidelines and examples given revolve around how to be act social, yet also represent a brand professionally. Of course Twitter is not left out and there's one example how SitePoint used a give-away to boost their Twitter followers with a free e-book and how that worked. Not covered too much was the merits of social networks. For instance, in the past few months there's been a lot of discussion on what is the value of Twitter followers. My impression has been that most of the people using it are in their 30's (basically Generation X) and either in marketing or web technology; Twitter has not experienced the same broad popularity in the same way that FaceBook or MySpace have. So it's worth considering if Twitter is an effective way to reach your audience, especially if your not going after a young-ish tech-minded group.

The chapters on e-mail marketing are similar to the chapter on social networking. The affiliate marketing chapter is kind of interesting, a lot of it has to do with creating your own affiliate program, and while it's not technical, it feels like there should be some more details there, but maybe that would turning a chapter into its own book.

Finally the last chapter wraps up what has been covered before and talks about how a campaign will pull the lessons of all the previous chapters together. As other reviews have said, a lot of the material might feel familiar to people who have been doing this kind of work before, but it's nicely packaged and organized, so even if the book becomes a reminder, it's a good one. For those just getting started, Online Marketing' is a good book to have on your desk.